The next round of Israeli-Palestinian talks is in the offing, but it
will probably turn out to be as futile as the last one. At least as
long as the Palestinian leadership persists in its unrealistic
preconditions, i.e. Israel to accept a priori the 1967 armistice line
as the border of the proposed Palestinian state, and stopping all
construction beyond that line, including in Jerusalem.

Students of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict can without difficulty
rattle off a list of failed international, mostly though not
exclusively American, as well as Israeli peace initiatives (including
MK Shaul Mofaz’s recent hodgepodge of hastily dusted off ideas – as
reported in The Jerusalem Post). However, it might be more fruitful
at this point to come to grips with the underlying reality behind
this ongoing failure, namely the fact that the Palestinian body-
politic has over the decades persistently shirked any peace plan or
formula predicated by the acceptance of Israel as the rightful nation-
state of the Jewish people, never giving up hope that one day it
would disappear.

The Arabs’ rejection of the 1947 UN partition plan and the ensuing
military aggression by seven Arab armies were a clear signal of this,
as was their refusal to accept UN Security Council Resolutions 242
and 338 in the sense that they were phrased, i.e. permanent peace
based on secure and mutually recognized borders. One could go on and
mention Arafat’s walkout at President Clinton’s Camp David or Mahmoud
Abbas’ rejection of Olmert’s and Livni’s wholesale concessions. Nor
can one ignore the on-and-off attempts to reverse the course of
history by resorting to force of arms and terrorism.

The 1967 war was an Egyptian-Syrian-Jordanian effort to strangle
Israel, while in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Egyptian army commander
General Murtagee exhorted his troops to “conquer the land which had
been stolen from the Arabs in Palestine.”

Though Israel’s enemies may have grasped by now the impossibility of
destroying Israel by military force or terrorist acts, because of
Israel’s overall military superiority and its strategic alliance with
the US, many of them haven’t given up hope of ultimately achieving
the same result by other means. Economic boycotts were tried, and
failed, but destabilizing Israel from within by flooding it
with “returning refugees” has not been taken off the table. Then
there is always the subterfuge to forgo negotiations altogether if
those might lead to acquiescing to Israel’s permanent existence, by
going to the UN.

The latest, though not necessarily the last, Palestinian stratagem is
the so-called “one-state solution.” The former Palestinian prime
minister, Ahmed Qurei, a.k.a. Abu-Ala, has endorsed this move and
even his antagonist Abbas has, albeit halfheartedly, raised it from
time to time, and according to press reports, he now intends
to “warn” Israel’s prime minister that “if the two-state solution
dies” – he would press for adopting the onestate way.

The Washington Post’s former Jerusalem correspondent, Joel Greenberg,
a few months ago wrote about a network of “young Palestinian
activists” who see the creation of a Palestinian state in the areas
occupied by Israel in 1967 as inadequate, calling instead for the
creation of one state “that would also include the area of Israel,
with equal rights for Jews [and] Arabs, and Palestinian refugees
allowed to return.” In other words, finis the Jewish State!

NONE OTHER than Harvard University’s Kennedy School (Harvard’s motto
is “Veritas,” Truth...) has recently sponsored a “One-State
Conference” jointly with several pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic
groups with the clear aim, as one observer described it, of
giving “an academic seal of approval to the de-legitimization of
Israel,” among other things, pairing “apartheid” and “Israel” and
refuting the Jewish people’s very existence as a national entity
under international law.

Not surprisingly, there are those on the anti-Semitic Left and Right
who support a one-state solution, confidently expecting that this
would result not only in the destruction of the Zionist dream, but
also in a situation where the continued existence of the remnants of
the Jewish population there would be tolerated, at best, as second-
class citizens.

But strange as it may seem, there are also some on the Israeli
patriotic Right who delusionally support the one-state concept,
though, of course, for opposite reasons. The very idea of giving up
parts of the Land of Israel is anathema to them, outweighing any
reference to potential matters of demography or democracy.

Some of them quote Jabotinsky to bolster their stance, forgetting
that his perception was of an Arab minority living in a Jewish
majority state in which, after renouncing their extremism, they would
enjoy equal, civil and national rights.

He even believed that Arabs should then be given the opportunity to
appoint a deputy to a Jewish prime minister – and vice versa,
eventually an Arab prime minister with a Jewish number two (the more
skeptical Ben-Gurion never entertained such ideas).

By any stretch of the imagination, also considering what’s happening
around us, can such a scenario seriously be considered today?
Palestinian separate statehood may or may not be the ideal solution
to the Palestinian problem. There may be different ones, some of
which were considered and perhaps too rashly shelved in the past, and
there may be others still on the drawing boards. Even Israeli-
initiated unilateral steps may have their day again. But the one-
state idea, whether raised by the Left or the Right, is not one of
them. This, by the way, is the view not only of Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu, but also of most Israelis.